Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

She was back with the freshly washed, angelically sleepy toddler in time to hear Aunty Alison’s voice, in the twilight, putting her own thought into words: ‘You want someone to look after some of them for you, and my Alice, she’s a good girl.’ They were two of a kind, her and Aunty Alison. And Aunty, who was always telling her there was more to life than a tilery in Essex, that there was a whole world out there, just waiting to be discovered, was winking at her now, winking and grinning, as if she’d struck lucky.

She had. The next morning she was off with the family; Alice leading the little boy’s pony, and ignoring the familiar eyes watching from behind the cow-parsley, and not letting herself see the thin boy-arms of Tom and Ham and Wat and Johnny and Jack waving goodbye, because she didn’t want to feel sad, and she was already too busy making herself indispensible to these new friends – daisy chains for the girls, stolen apples for the little boy, bright sweet nothings for the mum and dad. She was seizing the moment.

Of course the Champagnes were bitterly disappointed when they actually saw their manor – another of the weed-shrouded ruins Alice knew so well, with its villeins long gone, off hunting higher wages somewhere. She could have told them how it would be before they started, but she was twelve, old enough to know hard truths weren’t her business. So she cooed and comforted instead. She trapped them a hare to roast on a little spit. By the end of another week, when the Champagnes, already eager to forget their embarrassingly naive dream of sudden landed wealth, were sighing with relief at the sight of London on the horizon, they still had Alice with them. ‘Look,’ she was saying to little Tommy Champagne, managing not to look astonished herself at the great wall rearing up ahead, or the gate, or the soldiers. ‘Home soon now.’

She’d always thought she would climb high. It had only ever been a question of time, and opportunity.

When, weeping, the silver-haired Master Champagne put his wife into the grave a year later, then turned to Alice the capable maidservant and wept into her hair, and stroked it, and kissed her shoulder, she didn’t hesitate for a moment. She knew at once what she’d do. Even if she’d thought that you might only love – truly love – once in your life, and her true love certainly wasn’t dear wrinkly old Master Champagne, whose egg always went down his front in a forgetful yellow trail, she also knew there’d be no harm in him. He’d do for now.

A good man he turned out, too, in the rest of his short time in this vale of tears. He let her be the sturdy, independent sort of person she was. He laughed at her stories. In return for her good humour at sharing a bed with a spindle-shanked, grey-skinned old husband, he also became a more willing giver of ribbons from the fair than his daughters remembered him having been before. Also of new robes, not just the old mistress’s altered in the details, and (as Alice’s knowledge of what she might ask for increased) embroidery silks, and finally even French lessons, so she could act the lady rather than the baker’s wife with Master Champagne’s well-heeled clients.

Master Champagne loved the idea of his wife chatting in French with the gentry so much that he never said a cross word, or had an ugly thought, either, about the merry friendship Alice had had in those months before he passed away with the curly-haired young French master from Hainault. Young Jean Froissart was glad enough to earn some extra pennies as he set himself up in England, just by spending an afternoon in the City every week or two, chatting to a nice-looking girl so eager to learn; it all worked out well for everyone. As old Aunty Alison always said, ‘Pick up whatever you can by the wayside; you never know when it might come in handy.’

The French lessons paid off, all right, though maybe not as Tom Champagne expected. Or Alice, either, come to that.

Eight months after their marriage, he left behind the fuss and bustle of earthly life. He died straining on the chamber pot in the night, an indignity that Alice tactfully tidied up, when she woke up in the morning to find him cold on the floor, before calling for the servants. The poor old dear, she thought, opening the windows, having rearranged him, and wiped him down, and covered and hidden the pot; how he’d hate to have been seen like that. The French lessons were swapped for widow’s weeds. But a certain Master Perrers of Hainault, who’d advanced the Champagne family some money so their baking business could be expanded, and thus been part of the discussions with the lawyers that marked the settlement of the estate, had been as impressed by the young widow’s few words of elegantly pronounced French as he had by her sudden fortune (or so he said). Master Perrers, a plump lover of the pleasures of the table, who could be reduced to ecstatic groans by a good description of a rich sauce or a fine wine, was old enough, and foolish enough, to enjoy Alice’s flattering suggestion that he might be related to the gentry family of Perrers who’d once bought tiles from the kiln. Not that she’d told him, exactly, that this was her connection with that noble family; she couldn’t recall exactly, but she just might have teased him with the idea that those Perrerses were distant cousins of her own, for it pleased him so to think she might have a drop of gentry blood in her, and how would he, as a foreigner, ever know the difference? It did no harm. In any event, what with one thing and another, Master Perrers quickly stepped into the baker’s shoes, and married her at the church door forty days after Tom Champagne’s funeral. Bar a change of address and a different set of servants and the need to go visiting if she wanted to see little Tommy or the rest of the ‘children’ of her first marriage (the eldest of the girls now grown-up enough to take over the care of the little boy, while an aunt tried to find the daughters husbands), her new life with a different rich, indulgent, older merchant soon became all but indistinguishable from before. Once you got out of the gutter, the Alice of those days was given to thinking, once you didn’t have to rush about emptying chamber pots or stealing from ruins any more to keep body and soul together, pleasing people became a much simpler question of vocabulary. Before, in the old house, it had been frisky bed-accented French, all oui, monseigneur, and oh là là, the muscles on the man, morning noon and night, with happy little whiffles of pleasure back from him. Now all she needed to make a new man happy was to talk recipes – the grander and more full of expensive ingredients the better. How intently he listened. How carefully he repeated it all back, imagining every flavour with brain and tongue, and grunting with joy: ‘Cream and nutmeg and cinnamon and pepper? Baked in the peacock’s juices? Gnn-h!’

If poor Jankyn Perrers hadn’t died so soon, Alice has sometimes found herself thinking recently (a heart attack over a lobster dinner did for him, less than a year after he moved to England and only a few months after their marriage) – well, who can say? She might have stayed in the City to this day, growing fat with contentment and spending her energy nagging at her husband, or the next one, for a new music teacher or string of beads or bit of silk. She was happy enough, back in those days. You can be happy with so little when you’re young, and not in love, and remember enough about being poor to be grateful you’ve got food in your belly and clothes on your back, and nothing more serious to worry about than the next flirtation, innocent or otherwise.

But another part of her thinks: No, I’d never have stopped there. Not when there’s so much more in the world, so much higher to fly. And she’s always been right to go on, and take a bit more, and try another thing, and keep her eyes open, until now.